Variable compensation schemes, such as year-end bonuses, are popular in many industries as a mechanism for rewarding members of an organization for good individual performance or particular contributions toward good overall corporate performance. These compensation schemes are particularly common in professional services industries, such as law or accounting. Often, variable compensation is determined by allocating a predetermined pool of money to a group of employees. Because compensation is limited by the available pool of money, the compensation process must account for relative performance differences between different employees, as well as absolute performance metrics. Further, the process should consider not only objective, but also subjective, contributions by each employee. Thus, the compensation process should be designed to ensure fairness in distributing the available compensation pool.
In addition, organizations often use a committee of high-level employees or officers to determine variable compensation. The compensation process must, therefore, consolidate input from multiple committee members to determine the correct variable compensation. These committees generally use paper documentation or standard office spreadsheet and word processing tools for their work. In the absence of a standard process, committee members tend to create their own ad hoc systems for handling relevant data and tracking compensation recommendations.
Overall, the need exists for a system that overcomes the above problems, as well as one that provides additional benefits. In general, the examples herein of prior or related systems and their associated limitations are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of existing or prior systems will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon reading the following Detailed Description